My Tribute to Mary Oliver: Tuesday's Reflection

What could be a better tribute to a poet than to snuggle into a chair wrap up in a shawl, and browse lazily through her poems? 

Mary Oliver, whom I think of as the unofficial poet laureate of the United States, not just for one year, but for one year after another, died last week at the age of 83. More than 20 volumes of poetry by this Pulitzer Prize winning poet have been published. I own eight of those volumes, all stacked together on a shelf behind my desk where I can easily grab one for a quick poetry fix. How pretty they all look together. How smooth they feel in my hand. 

Reading her poems I feel as if I am walking with her, not quite beside her, but just a pace or two behind her. I strain to hear what she says, and I note where she points or pauses. 

I started reading Oliver's poems when we lived in Ohio on Sweetwater Farm. I was a city girl who wanted to be more at home with the gifts of nature, and Mary was one of my guides. She encouraged me --not that she knew it, of course--to pay attention, to lean into the precious world around me, even when the lessons offered were sometime painful. And then she helped me grieve. 

Behind our barn was a small pond, which wasn't visible from the house. One had to be deliberate about going to the pond, and, in fact, after my cancer surgery I measured my healing by the number of times I walked around that pond before needing to rest. The pond was often a resting place for a Great Blue Heron. I was only aware of it when I walked from the back door of our house to the garage or into the garden. My movement, my presence, even at a distance, bothered her, and before I saw her, I heard her lift off, her wings flapping like sheets on a clothesline, and then I saw her in the sky above me. 

I was always in awe of that unwieldy bird's ability to lift its top heavy body and take off, especially since the small pond didn't give her much space to make a running start. 

According to Animal-Speak by Ted Andrews, the heron is a symbol of self-determination and self-reliance. The heron's long legs are symbols of balance, and they represent an ability to progress and evolve and to explore life deeply. "But you must be able to stand on your own." 

The heron was a messenger for me during our Sweetwater Farm years, as was Mary Oliver's poem "Heron Rises from the Dark Summer Pond" in the book, What Do We Know, Poems and Prose Poems. Here's an excerpt:


                                     So heavy
              is the long-necked, long-bodied heron,
                             always it is a surprise
                     when her smoke-colored wings

                                        open
                                    and she turns
                              from the thick water,
                              from the black sticks

                              of the summer pond,
                                      and slowly
                                  rises into the air
                                     and is gone.

                             ...

                          And especially it is wonderful
                             that the summers are long
                       and the ponds so dark and so many,
                             and therefore it isn't a miracle

                                  but the common thing,
                                        this decision,
                         this trailing of the long legs in the water,
                               this opening up of the heavy body

                              into a new life: see how the sudden
                                   gray-blue sheets of her wings
                  strive toward the wind; see how the clasp of nothing 
                                                     takes her in. 


I wonder about the last poem Mary Oliver wrote. Did she write about a heron opening up to a new life? I like to think she did.

An Invitation
Do you have a favorite Mary Oliver poem? I would love to know.